Media Gallery

The Sunday after George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, thousands of people, myself among them, marched from Union Square in New York City with a clear message: We believe the lives of black people have value. A political protest is a mass demand, but within that demand are a world of individuals, and within each of them a world of politics and experience.

As protesters chanted “We ARE Tray-von Mar-tin,” I found myself pausing, considering that declaration. I am Asian American, and marching that Sunday meant confronting my relation to Martin, to blackness, and to the racial structure of America.

The (mainly) white Americans writing on blogs like “We Are Not Trayvon Martin” acknowledge that they cannot claim Martin’s experience as their own. They have not been profiled, stalked by vigilantes, abused by the police; if they are arrested for, say, drug usage, their chances of being sent to jail are a fraction of African Americans’. As one sign read on Sunday, “They Never Stop & Frisk Old White Guys Like Me.”

Protesters in Oakland following the Zimmerman verdict this July (Courtesy Steve Rhodes/Flickr)

Asian people in America are perpetually caught between black and white, or in this instance, “We are Trayvon” and “We are not Trayvon.” It is a dance between shelter and targeting, complicity and outsiderness. Latinos face a similar dilemma. As Isa Hopkins wrote recently in Salon, regarding George Zimmerman’s ambiguous relation to whiteness, “The genius of white supremacy is in its elasticity: It can expand to include the not-quite-right, the off-whites, when necessary, and then otherize and eject us when convenient.”

Some Asian Americans have been Trayvon Martin in the past: in 1975, when Peter Yew was brutally beaten by police and it took the largest rallies in New York Chinatown’s history (some 10-20,000) to secure promises of no further police harassment; in 1982, when Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat because his killers, who never served jail time, confused him with the Japanese auto industry; in 2001, when Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Punjabi Sikh, was shot and killed by a man who mistook him for Muslim and conflated Islam with 9/11; in 2011, when Private Danny Chen was driven to suicide by the racial tormenting of his peers and superiors in the army.

A still from the 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin

But today, the much-publicized “model minority” myth will tell you about the ‘success’ and assimilation of Asian Americans—so much that elite colleges may be quietly capping the numbers of Asians they admit. This is not a compliment. Indeed, it divides Asians from other people of color, obscures the real needs of Asian communities—e.g., between 2007 and 2010, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders had the highest long-term unemployment rate of any group—and marginalizes the experiences of working class Asian immigrants.

What are we to make of this fractured portrait? We are highly educated but increasingly unemployed, growing in political clout but under-represented, examples of the American success story who have on occasion been beaten, tortured, and killed for our race. To move beyond this binary, Asian Americans must find a politics that, through solidarity and activism, breaks the de facto apartheid that creates it.

Protesters in solidarity with the black liberation struggle in front of the Oakland court house in 1969

Modern Asian American activism was built upon this premise, and Afro-Asian solidarity created a broader horizon for both groups. Malcolm X saw the post-colonial struggles in Africa as analogs to black struggles in America; for him, liberation did not end with a Civil Rights bill, but came with self-pride and self-determination. Asian American pioneers like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama worked with Malcolm, and organizers in the black communities of Detroit and Harlem, respectively. They, in turn, trained and cultivated a generation of activists.

Taking these lessons, 1970s Asian American organizers identified more with the National Liberation Front of Vietnam than the US Army, put forth a program of cultural self-expression and identity formation, and served the underserved Asian communities in America. Under the Third World banner, nonwhite groups in the U.S. identified with the postcolonial struggles in the world around them, seeking collective liberation.

(Courtesy Steve Rhodes/Flickr)

Today, we do not have the same sense of a global, united front. Instead, organizations have learned from these histories and worked to build local and regional solidarities. Recently in New York, CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and Desis Rising Up and Moving campaigned fiercely to end Stop and Frisk, and have been outspoken in demanding justice for Trayvon Martin. Asian communities are not targeted by bills like Stop and Frisk, but by ‘passing’ we become complicit in a racial classification that can just as easily turn against us.

Groups like these refuse to be circumscribed in division between model or problem minority. We cannot choose whether we are seen as Trayvon Martin, and will be caught by the whims of the American racial hierarchy until that hierarchy is broken.

Events

Four Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm)
Tuesdays, August 8, August 15, August 22, and August 29
Fees & Payment Options:
$220 General / $200 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!)
Full payment due before first class. Maximum of ten students.
Why you should take this class: Writer & Director Darine Hotait bridges the gap between literature and cinema due to her genuine fascination and devotion to both. A mentor in numerous screenwriting workshops at film festivals and institutions such as the Med Film Festival in Rome, Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam, Mizna Literary Gathering in Minneapolis, among others —Darine invites you to learn how to take the elements that construct a screenplay into development: act structure, character development, and scene breakdown.
Class Description: Develop your screenwriting skills with award-winning writer and director Darine Hotait, whose films screened at top international film festivals, received multiple Best Fiction awards and were acquired by Sundance TV, AMC Networks & BBC Channel. Her feature screenplays were selected at Cannes Film Festival's International Scriptwriters' Pavilion and were among the top 5 finalists at Hearst Screenwriting Competition. She's the recipient of the AFAC cinema grant and a current literary fellow at New York Foundation for the Arts.
Over the period of 4 weeks, writers will be guided through the process of developing a feature film screenplay using various hands-on exercises. Participants are expected to have a one-page storyline that they wish to develop into a feature film screenplay during the workshop. REGISTER HERE
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org
Darine Hotait is the writer and director of various short films Beirut Hide and Seek (2011), and I Say Dust(2015), which screened at over 70 international film festivals and received multiple Best Short Fiction awards. Her films received prestigious distribution and were acquired by reputable platforms such as AMC Network, Sundance Channel, BBC Channel, Shorts International & The Journal of Short Films. Her debut science fiction feature film project Symphony of a Flood was selected at the International Screenwriters' Pavilion at Cannes Film Festival 2016 and was a finalist at the prestigious Hearst Screenwriting Competition at San Francisco Film Society.
Her plays and short stories have been published in numerous publications in print and online. Darine has mentored over 50 screenwriting workshops around the world at various institutions and international film festivals. Since 2010, Darine serves as the founder and creative director of Cinephilia Productions in New York City, an incubator for the development of writers and filmmakers from the MENA region.
Praise for I Say Dust (2015)“The film’s power and beauty comes in its subtlety. The story’s intensity and potency lies in Darine’s ability to sing cinematic brilliance in the interstices between scenes and to reveal more about the characters in their silence. The plot is unsaturated and always in dialogue with the audience: what is strategically unpictured by Darine is viscerally felt by the viewer.”
— Leena Habiballah, Qahwa Project, US“The characters are complex, the writing – interspersed with poetry – is so touching, and the shots so poignant it just seems like a damn shame it’s a short rather than a feature length film.”
— Wided Khadraoui, Kalimat Magazine“There is romance, sweet and ephemeral - an encounter more potent, perhaps, for the sense of coming home. A thoughtful film which packs a lot of ideas into a tight space, I Say Dust speaks well to the talents of those involved. It’s no surprise that it has multiple awards to its name.”
— Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film (Edinburgh)..

Four Sessions, 2 hours each (7-9pm)
Wednesdays August 9th, August 16th, August 23rd, August 30th
Fees & Payment Options:
$200 General / $180 AAWW Members (JOIN THE FAN CLUB!)
Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students.
Why you should take this class: Poet Sally Wen Mao, award-winning author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013, BOMB Magazine, Poetry, and more. You can explore Lavender Town in The Margins and check out the feature in Bustle listing her as one of the best poetry debuts in the last five years. Sally Wen Mao invites you to re-invent language and to re-invent the familiar in this protest poetry workshop.
Class Description: We are living in a senseless political era. How do we react, as writers, artists, and citizens? Where do we channel our anger, our protest, our ideals – how do we do right by our art and our politics? In this workshop, participants consider the political poem and examine the ways to approach resistance through language, lyric, and form—in poetry or in lyric essays. Drawing from contemporary poets like Layli Long Soldier, Tommy Pico, Timothy Yu, Srikanth Reddy, Solmaz Sharif, and Claudia Rankine, we will examine over the course of several sessions the tools we can use to dismantle the powerful narratives that silence and oppress – and in that process, discover our own political voice. This course will include writing exercises and generative sessions as well as a workshop.
REGISTER HERE
Questions? Contact Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org
Sally Wen Mao is the author of OCULUS (Graywolf Press 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, among others. Her poems have received a Pushcart Prize and published in Tin House, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2013, and A Public Space, among others.
​”​Linguistically dexterous and formally astute, Mao’s tight and textured debut ​[Mad Honey Symposium] ​conjures an absurd, lush, occasionally poisonous world and the ravenous humans and animals that travel through it. . . . With echoes of Glück and Plath, Mao generates stunning landscapes where the flora and fauna reflect her presence and strength of voice.​”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In Mad Honey Symposium, Sally Wen Mao offers delicious diction: ‘archipelago . . . arpeggios;’ ‘horntails / swarm the wax leaves;’ ‘Fetal and feral, we curl;’ ‘mouth on your pendulum;’ ‘in the rigmarole of lucky living—!’ She also offers a heightened attention to how words work and work out in various contexts. The poet takes us all over the place in time and geography—from her mother’s bed to Audubon’s dreams to sputnik to hive and back again—all in the service of feeling deeply. A lovely debut collection.”
—Kimiko Hahn..

'I glanced curiously at the stranger. He looked old and frail. The sky outside the window seemed darker with his figure in profile. Though he was sitting next to us, he appeared to be somewhere else entirely.'